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A drawing of the armory, center, with the tin shop to its right and kitchen to the left, limns the heart of the Anderson complex.

The author, right, reviews progress on excavation at the tin shop site, to be part of the reconstructed Anderson Armoury, with staff archaeologist Mark Kostro.

Jeffery E. Klee

Master carpenter Garland Wood, right, works with Jack Underhill on framing one of the Anderson Armoury buildings.

Complex Reconstruction: The James Anderson Armoury

by Edward A. Chappell

Restoration and reconstruction best serve
education when they encompass sites as opposed
to single buildings, because the research
must be more widely conceived and because
a unified landscape of buildings offers a richer and
more compelling portrait of life in the past. Just
as Colonial Williamsburg's George Wythe House is
more evocative because of its Palace Green location,
the Historic Area's Peyton Randolph House became
more comprehensible with the reconstruction of its
lost outbuildings. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
is positioned to do such work because of its
commitment to diverse research on the material life
of eighteenth-century Anglo America.

Most restoration or reconstruction is expensive,
so it is only done when substantial funds are available.
But the ability to do such work well depends
on a dedication to scholarship. Since 1927, foundation
scholars have captured rich information about
specific buildings
and landscapes,
and about the
nature of housing
and work
environments in
the Revolutionary
age. The work
on Historic Area
sites is multigenerational.

The James
Anderson
site on Duke
of Gloucester Street
is an example. The
Frenchman's
Map,
a 1782 plan of the
city that guides
Williamsburg's
restoration, roughly
shows the size and position of five buildings within the property
that blacksmith and public armorer James Anderson
acquired in 1770, and the map was scrutinized
before the first excavation was done there in 1932.
That digging found fragmentary brick remains of the
house, often used as a tavern before Anderson's ownership,
as well as the principal blacksmith shop and
its forges, two detached kitchens, a well, three other
outbuildings, and two brick-vaulted drains. The
house was reconstructed in 1940, accompanied by
the eastern kitchen, a part of the shop, and a privy.

The site was one of several targeted for new
study and re-creation in the mid-1970s, intended
to broaden the foundation's presentation of
Williamsburg life in the 1760s and 1770s, supported
by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Ivor Noël Hume
directed and Robert Foss managed an archaeological
reinvestigation of the site. The earlier excavators,
led by James Knight, had dug parallel trenches
before striking
masonry, which
he uncovered and
measured. Noël
Hume and Foss
took a more developed
approach,
studying soil
stains and the
position of artifacts
to recognize
non-masonry features
and to interpret
the site's
evolution. They
discovered that
parts of the main
work structure
and its forges had
been robbed of
their brick after
the Revolution
and identified the west kitchen—not the reconstructed east one—as
having been built before circa 1760 and used to
serve the adjoining tavern until the 1770s.

The size and location of the ironworkers' forges
were relatively clear, but the sequence of outer
foundations was difficult to read because the remains
were fragmentary. Foss hypothesized that
the main forge building evolved in phases as James
Anderson expanded his blacksmith operation. Based
on these findings, my foundation colleagues and I
developed a reconstruction of the blacksmith shop
in the early 1980s that expanded the spectrum of
eighteenth-century building practice guests could
visit. The reconstructed workshop exemplified the
rougher, cheaper, less-permanent structures that
shared the eighteenth-century Chesapeake landscape
with such refined and durable buildings as
the gentry and artisans' houses for which Colonial
Williamsburg is known.

We repositioned the reconstructed privy and second
kitchen and conducted six excavations between
1983 and 2000 as steps toward re-creating the Anderson
complex. This work explored a southern ancillary
building and the work yard, and it uncovered
ghostly remains of a post-1782 forge to the east. The
Anderson shop became a popular exhibition under
the direction of master blacksmiths Peter Ross and
Kenneth Schwarz. Their team of smiths produced
almost all the specialized hardware used at Colonial
Williamsburg and other museums, all in front of an
audience of 300,000 visitors a year.

Time encouraged the hopes of the architectural
historians and blacksmiths to complete the
site's restoration. The additional excavations, for
example, found evidence for tinsmithing that
matched Anderson's ledger entries for purchasing
tin and paying tinsmith Nathaniel Nuthall. The
excavators learned that much of the ironworking
and earlier refuse one could expect to find in the
work yard had been removed and perhaps redeposited
nearby.

Schwarz studied Anderson's account books,
finding an unstudied one in the Daughters of the
American Revolution archive in Washington. Close
reading of the volumes showed the shop was built
in wartime, when the need to maintain arms for
the Continental Army and Virginia militia required
expanding the operation, at state expense.
Schwarz says Anderson's prewar blacksmith work
was confined to the adjoining Barraud property,
where Anderson resided, leading us to reevaluate the periods archaeologically assigned to the foundations
in the 1970s.

Williamsburg mason Humphrey Harwood was
paid for constructing those foundations August 13,
1778, when he billed the commonwealth for "underpinning
the armourer's shop" with 6,950 bricks.
Delivery of 13,000 nails to carpenter Phillip Moody
that October—also for the armory—further indicates
that the large structure was erected in a single
campaign. Ledger entries for hinges in the public
store records allowed us to calculate how many doors
and shutters enclosed the building.

The interpretation of the written records began
to focus on Anderson's role as public armorer at
this site from 1778 until his operation moved
with the government to Richmond in 1780. The
re-created complex could, then, serve as more
than a portrait of the largest trade work site in
1770s Williamsburg. It could portray the degree
to which the town was pressed into service to support
the war. Given its potential for strengthening
the foundation's Revolutionary City educational
program, a proposal was developed for Colonial
Williamsburg donor and board member Forrest E.
Mars Jr., who agreed to fund the project. This effort
would include further archaeological investigation,
design, and construction, overseen by James Horn,
Colonial Williamsburg's vice president of research
and historical interpretation and the Abby and
George O'Neill Director of the John D. Rockefeller,
Jr. Library.

We began excavations in 2010 by more
closely studying remains of the kitchen
and structures extending south of the armory
toward Francis Street, and by exploring the
perimeter. Work on the kitchen shows how new
technologies can be turned on previously studied
evidence to provide additional information. Noël
Hume and Foss had found a pattern of plaster refuse
seemingly tossed from the front door of the kitchen
into the yard behind the house, as well as evidence
for a clay floor. This helped define the character of
the cookhouse as sufficiently well built to be partially
plastered but sufficiently inferior to have a low
earth floor. But precisely what kind of plaster and
earth? Earlier excavators purposely had left areas of
the plaster scatter and the floor in place, so we could
extract and microscopically analyze how lime, sand,
and brick dust were mixed with clay for the floor,
and how brown plaster was applied to oak lath and
whitewashed before its removal about 1800.

We have long studied buildings that housed cooking
and enslaved workers in the early Chesapeake
region, and the new reconstruction incorporates
findings drawn from these and other structures.
This includes such choices made to reduce construction
costs as riving the siding in four-foot lengths
of clapboard lapped and nailed to studs on two-foot
centers rather than the then more costly sawn and
beaded weatherboards. Often ephemeral, their survival
is rare.

Historic Trades carpenters led by Garland Wood
are reconstructing the armory buildings present
in 1778, employing eighteenth-century techniques,
much as they did earlier at the Peyton Randolph
House. As at the more-recent coffeehouse reconstruction,
they are working with Historic Trades
brickmakers, who are hand-molding the bricks and
burning them in clamps modeled on the archaeological
remains of temporary brick kilns in the region.
They are laying the masonry under the tutelage of
Raymond Cannetti. Viewers watch the work on the
foundation website thanks to two full-time webcams,
which capture the drama of orchestrated wall raisings
and the pace of laying bricks in shell mortar,
one at a time.

Architectural historians Willie Graham, Jeff
Klee, and I are designing the buildings in collaboration
with Wood and Schwarz. Wood, for example, has
argued for wartime use of lumber sawn in waterpowered
mills and used elsewhere in Virginia but
seldom seen in pre-Revolutionary buildings in and
near the capital. Schwarz balances our experience in studying regional work buildings with his in making and repairing ironwork in the manner used by Anderson's workers.

Sustained excavation in Williamsburg allows us to recognize patterns of how the community organized its functions spatially, such as placing freestanding kitchens behind houses and taverns and raising other buildings along secondary edges of property controlled by constructing fences. Williamsburg was laid out in a formal manner in 1699, and lots were sold, divided, and combined in rectangular arrangements for more than two centuries. But the urban plan was laid over an uneven landscape, and residents filled in ravines, redirected rainwater, and disposed of refuse in ways that made the undulating topography better conform to a Cartesian civic grid.

Excavation at the perimeter of the Anderson yard illustrates this in ways that reveal how warfare disrupted old boundaries. Fences enclosing the Anderson lot were built and rebuilt throughout the eighteenth century, leaving posthole stains, often cutting into one another. For about two decades before the Revolution, the armory site was a busy tavern. Its kitchen workers and others threw garbage over the property fence to the west, gradually filling a ravine traversed by a city-built, brick-vaulted drain that still passes under Duke of Gloucester Street and empties beside the Printing Office. Faunal archaeologists Joanne Bowen and Steve Atkins's initial study of the remains reveals that the taverns served dishes ranging from sturgeon to goose. This was gentry fare.

A large, roughly built, all-wood stable seems to have stood on the east side of the ravine, possibly one mentioned in a 1745 advertisement for the western property, and resembling an earlier stable on the James Wray's construction yard off Nicolson Street. By about 1770, the structure was demolished, and replaced with a better-built workshop hugging the edge of the trash-strewn ravine.

Anderson recast his lot and part of the adjoining property to serve the war effort as the government armory. Harwood and Moody built an armory containing four forges with bellows squeezed between the kitchen and the western shop. Anderson pulled up a fence that had separated the old domestic work yard from the tavern's rear gardens and paddocks, and built fences to control public access from Duke of Gloucester Street while securing the newly enlarged yard for trade work.

The latest archaeological evidence suggests that it was then, just before heavy work began at the armory, that additional brick-vaulted drains were constructed to remove rainwater from the yard and wastewater from the kitchen, now serving metalworkers instead of tavern guests. The brick drain descended into the ravine and connected to the major line passing under the street. Someone other than Harwood built masonry rapidly, and dirt dug from its ditch was thrown over the vault even before the mortar had dried.

A diagonal fence was built contrary to property lines, passing over the drain and drawing the north end of the west shop into the realm of the armory. It is perhaps then that the shop became identified with tinsmithing. Late owner Mary Stith referred to it as "the tin shop" in her 1813 will.

Armory workers began discarding the waste from their work—coal clinkers, cast-off parts of weapons, a crucible containing brass—into the ravine, further covering the drain. Layers of the coal-bearing black waste built up within the fenced enclosure, along with garbage from the kitchen. Wartime strata contained bones from large cuts of beef, much of it boiled, contrasting with remains of the old tavern food. Half a dozen cattle hooves could suggest an unrefined diet or the production of neat's-foot oil for leather. Anderson accounts refer to purchase of "11 pairs of cows feet." Soon after 1782, the diagonal fence was removed, snips from tinsmithing and other waste were dumped into the postholes, and prewar property boundaries reestablished. Anderson returned to the site, once again bounded by a rectangular fence, and resumed blacksmithing, doing civilian work.

These and other activities left archaeological traces. One aspect of the armory project is the degree to which such traces can be found and read eighty years after the first investigator set shovel to dirt in Williamsburg. Discoveries of physical evidence for changes such as wartime disruption of the rectangular property grid can be combined with fresh perspectives on written documents to re-create lost settings. The fully crafted sites become more legible settings in which to experiment with and portray ways of life in the country's past.